by Zach Mortice
Associate Editor

Summary: Urbanist and author Jane Jacobs’ advocacy against the rezoning of the Brooklyn industrial waterfront provides another opportunity to assess her work and legacy, especially in light of the Municipal Art Society of New York’s new exhibit, “Jane Jacobs and the Future of New York.” Jacobs’ objections to the rezoning stem from her belief that large-scale master planning stifles the authentic and organic growth of cities, which is better accomplished through the proliferation of mixed uses and social and architectural diversity.

Though only separated by a few narrow blocks, the commercial and industrial districts of the northern Brooklyn neighborhood of Greenpoint are a world apart. On Manhattan Ave., the street bustles with small grocers, cafes, and local banks. Its rambling, 19th-century charm is rich in architectural diversity. Brownstones sit next to apartment blocks that sit next to neo-Gothic churches. The neighborhood has welcomed wave after wave of immigrants, and today it’s the heart of Brooklyn’s Polish community. Architecture historian, writer, and Brooklyn resident Francis Morrone would call it a “working class utopia” if this designation didn’t sound like such a knee-jerk liberal construction.

Next to this bustling streetscape sits a disused vestige of the past known as the Brooklyn waterfront. Low-slung warehouses sit empty, and factories are hollow. Brick walls decay, and corrugated steel panels rust. On a rainy afternoon in October, workmen at the few remaining industrial and storage tenants walk out of these husks with boarded up windows and lock up chain link fences as soon as a curious walking tour group strolls through the desolate streets. Abandoned lots that are the result of a mysterious fire last year sprout weeds and refuse piles. A stone’s throw away from the Manhattan skyline, a decaying insularity pervades and the waterfront sits fallow.

But developers have a remedy. In May of 2005, the New York City Council approved a plan put forth by developers to rezone almost 200 blocks of the Greenpoint and Williamsburg waterfront so that they can build a series of luxury high-rise apartment buildings connected by park spaces and waterfront esplanades. The developers believe that this “working class utopia” can co-exist with professional class elegance, but some residents and community activists are skeptical. They see the rezoning as a way to crush the remaining industrial economy and displace working class residents. The community assembled their own redevelopment plan (called 197a) that drew on the neighborhoods’ strengths to respect its current scale and retain its village-like atmosphere. But, according to the Gotham Gazette, the city has done nothing to implement this plan. Meanwhile, skyscrapers are already rising in Williamsburg.

To combat what is one of the most ambitious rezoning projects in the city’s history, these neighborhood advocates experienced a bit of history themselves when Jane Jacobs, author of the Death and Life of Great American Cities, joined their ranks with what would become her final act as the late 20th century’s pre-eminent urbanist and city planning theorist. In April of 2005, she sent Mayor Michael Bloomberg a blunt and succinct letter objecting to the rezoning. A year later, she died.

Too rich or too poor
Settled and developed in the mid-19th century, the Greenpoint industrial waterfront was formerly a manufacturing hub that sent its products (ironworks, rope, ships, pencils) around the world. To try to protect the waterfront from wrecking ball-wielding developers and preserve this industrial past, the National Trust for Historic Buildings has declared the waterfront one of America’s 11 most endangered historic places.

Brooklyn, however, could hardly be called an area in decline. It’s in the midst of a demographic and cultural renaissance, as young professionals, artists, and new immigrants have been priced out of Manhattan and are making Brooklyn their home. Gentrification is already well established there, forcing these young creative types further east in an L-train migration that has moved the hipness frontier from Park Slope, to Williamsburg, to Bushwick. If these professional Manhattan émigrés are already being pushed further and further away from the city, what hope will working class, multi-ethnic communities have of staying in their neighborhoods once the waterfront is filled with sparkling luxury condos?

“Ballet of the sidewalk”
If she had ever visited Greenpoint, Morrone thinks she would have been pleased. Its “Jacobsien virtues”, as he calls them, illustrate what Jacobs loved most about cities: the unpredictable mix of users and uses that act out what she called the “ballet of the sidewalk. This intricately choreographed everyday pattern of use and circulation is what Jacobs thought made neighborhoods vibrant and successful. In Greenpoint, like in Jacobs’ mid-century Greenwich Village where she formulated many of her ideas about cities, the diverse building stock, high population density, and integration of different uses across the neighborhood all mutually reinforce each other. Its ethnically and socio-economically diverse population (Poles, immigrant Hispanics, and a growing number of Caucasian white collar professionals) requires housing and commercial space of different types, old and affordable, and new and expensive.

Jacobs was aware of how rapid success or (“oversucess”) could drain a city of diversity of uses. In Death and Life, she details how a prevailingly popular and successful single use can overwhelm and choke a neighborhood, spreading blandness and homogeneity. Any time a single use is deemed the most successful and lucrative in a given district and begins to crowd out other uses, Jacobs argues, the balance of the district is disturbed and vitality and new ideas are not likely to take root there. A block composed entirely of nightclubs is likely to be shuttered and deserted during the day and congested and stifling at night. “The triumph is hollow,” she wrote. “A most intricate and successful organism of economic mutual support and social mutual support has been destroyed by the process.”

Why can’t a city just be a city?
Jacobs’ advocacy of the unplanned, naturally evolving city was a reaction against city planners’ attempts to impose artificial order on cities, including Sir Ebenezer Howard’s 19th-century “Garden City” model and Le Corbusier’s 20th-century “Radiant City” model. The rezoning of Brooklyn is a quite literal example of the “Radiant Garden City.” Thirty residential towers of up to 40 stories surrounded by parks will look across the East River. In her letter (which Morrone says she never intended to be public), Jacobs attacked the rezoning for destroying manufacturing jobs, neglecting to provide community amenities like schools and daycare, and irresponsibly breaking with the architectural heritage and low-rise scale of Brooklyn in an attempt to supplant existing housing with “visually tiresome, unimaginative, and imitative luxury project towers … Of course the community’s plan does not promote any of the visions and destructive results mentioned,” she wrote. “Why would it? Are the citizens of Greenpoint and Williamsburg vandals? Are they so inhumane they want to contrive the possibility of jobs for their neighbors and for the greater community? Surely not.”

The rezoning plan seeks to protect the low-rise, mixed-use nature of the inland blocks, but some residents and planning experts are skeptical that the remaining industrial and commercial uses will remain. In the Gotham Gazette, City University of New York Professor Tom Angotti argues that further gentrification, spurred on by the construction of the luxury towers, will increase property values so that residential housing is far more lucrative than industry. The rezoning plan allows individual landowners in mixed-use zones to decide whether housing or industry will predominate, and there is no reason to suggest that Williamsburg and Greenpoint landlords won’t behave like rational consumers and adopt the use the market values most.

Some of Jacobs’ ideas have been co-opted by this “Radiant Garden City” rezoning. Her predilection for mixed uses is seen in the plan, as well as her appreciation for mixed income levels. In order to build up to 40 stories tall, developers must set aside 20 percent of their units for middle- and low-income residents. If they don’t set these aside, they can only build up to 23 to 33 stories tall at the market rate, according to the New York Times. In the grip of an affordable housing crisis in New York, market rate means luxury, and community coalitions fought for up to 40 percent of the units to be set aside for lower income residents.

What, exactly, is a developer allowed to buy?
At a panel discussion sponsored by the Municipal Art Society of New York that focused on Jane Jacobs’ legacy and the role of modern developers, Williamsburg residents and activists voiced their objections to the rezoning. Several expressed concerns about using affordable housing as a bonus expense that allows developers to build denser and higher. One told the panel of New York developers that he had helped formulate the community’s 197a plan and assailed the optional affordable housing clauses as “zoning for sale.” He asked if the developers thought that affordable housing should simply be mandatory in New York. Several agreed that it should, but they could not agree to be strict urban preservationists, whether they were safeguarding the homes of the rich or the poor.

Throughout the discussion, they reaffirmed that changes in settlement and density will always happen in dynamic urban environments. Carlton Brown, a founding partner of Full Spectrum, a development company that specializes in green and sustainable projects in emerging markets, says that people often fail to think about urban changes in long enough terms. One hundred fifty years ago, Brooklyn was inspiring pastoral odes by Walt Whitman. “In the span of cities [that’s] not really a long time” Brown says. “And so, Williamsburg was rezoned, and I can assure you that 130 years from now Williamsburg will look nothing like it looks like today.” For Brown, the task for the next 130 years is to manage this change so that it works for “a wide array of people so that we tie into this notion that there is ultimately enough to go around.”

Beyond left and right
Though a consistent advocate of the marginalized local resident, Jacobs was also happy to let the uninhibited free market of neighborhood economies shape this resident’s life.

“She was somebody was revered by both liberals and conservatives,” says Morrone. “If you read interviews with her, she sort of slightly changes her message to appeal to these people, and I think she did this very knowingly. She was very crafty in the way that she spoke to different groups.”

The Municipal Art Society is hosting an exhibit through January 5, 2008, that features Jacobs‘ work, legacy, and democratic vision of what cities can be. The lasting impression that emerges from this showcase is the idea that cities, the great generators of culture in modern society, truly draw their vitality and richness not from their stock of museums, symphonies, art societies, or institutional heft, but from the plainspoken, everyday people who make up these organizations. For Jacobs, the city was a place where everyone’s fate is bound together. Isolation is impossible, because if one fails we all fail.

This message of simple populist revisionism was always matched in the anecdotal and practical tone of her books, and in her letter to Mayor Bloomberg. “Come on,” she pleaded. “Do the right thing. The community really does know best.”